Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's an honour to appear before you again, and it's an extra special honour to be able to be here with my colleague Iryna Suslova, who is doing such incredible work on behalf of the children of Ukraine.
This morning at 7:00, eastern standard time, the Yale school of public health's humanitarian research lab, as part of the State Department-funded Conflict Observatory, released a new report on the issue of Russia's treatment of children from Ukraine, entitled “Russia’s Systematic Program of Coerced Adoption and Fostering of Ukraine’s Children”.
This report is the result of a 20-month investigation that resulted in the identification of 314 children from Ukraine. Of those 314 children, 148 were listed in Russia's child placement databases, including 42 who have already been placed for adoption or guardianship or have had a citizen of Russia appointed as their guardian. An additional 166 of these 314 children we have identified, using the databases in large part, have been placed with citizens of Russia for fostering.
I want to state the headline of this research very clearly, because what it shows is that our worst fears are realized. Russia is adopting Ukraine's children systematically, in contravention of international law.
If you remember, in March 2023, Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the child rights commissioner of Russia, were indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. What we are discussing here today is a higher order of crime, which, according to Professor Oona Hathaway of the international law department at Yale law school, may constitute crimes against humanity. It's a higher order of crime.
In the initial war crime indictments, the issue was forced deportation. What we are discussing now is the transfer of protected persons from one national or ethnic group to another. That was the basis of the eighth Nuremberg trial, known as the RuSHA trial, against the Nazis for turning Polish children, through a process of Germanification, into German children during World War II.
What we know now is that in addition to the 314 we could identify, there are significantly more Ukrainian children who are basically being posted in these three interconnected databases. One is run by the Ministry of Education. One is funded directly by President Putin's office through the presidential grants fund and an organization called ANO TsRSP.
What we know is that these children are fundamentally being offered to Russian families through an act of deception. They are being presented as if they originated in Russia when, in fact, they originated in Ukraine. You need to know that under Russia's adoption laws, it is a requirement that, for a child to be adopted or fostered, they must be a citizen of Russia. Putin, while violating international law, has sought to comply with Russia's child welfare law. That means, with the Duma and through presidential declaration, working with Maria Lvova-Belova and Anna Kuznetsova of United Russia and the Duma, he has created a pipeline for temporary guardianship and proxy conveyance of citizenship to children from Ukraine.
This is the sum of all fears, because when children are adopted in Russia, the “new parents” and the “new families” can change their names, change their personally identifiable information, and they, for all intents and purposes, disappear.
We know that children have gone to 21 regions in Russia. We think that inside this database, there are children from Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson. The children we identified are from Donets and Luhansk, which were areas under Russia's control prior to the 2022 invasion. We think children from areas taken after February 2022 may also be in the database, but we haven't found them yet.
Tomorrow morning, I will address the United Nations Security Council with U.S. ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and we will bring this issue and this evidence directly to Russia and the members of the council. It is there we will have a simple demand: Russia needs to do now what it should have done at the beginning—